Howells.

I talk about Cameron Koczon so much on this blog that it might look a little like too much bromance is in the air. But I’d go as far to say he’s one of the most inspiring characters in our industry right now, and he’s doing more than most to promote the role and importance of the designer in start-up land.

If you haven’t seen him talk live (at his conference, Brooklyn Beta, for instance or at tomorrow’s New Adventures in Web Design), I think this A List Apart article by him captures much of Cameron’s belief.

The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by.

While I agree with everything he says, the issue of solving bigger problems is something I talked about in a previous post. In our typical cosy worlds it’s tricky to identify the right problems to solve with the skills we have at our disposal, and thereon how to pull the right group of individuals together to help create solutions. And let’s not forget about funding: while so many solutions can be prototyped easily, a viable product needs funding and/or access to a good network of influencers to which many of us have little access (particularly in London, and the UK, I would argue).

I’m excited that some agencies and people have taken up the challenge to facilitate projects for good via design and technology (such as the guys from the new London-based agency, Betabüro who I met recently) but I feel there’s another conversation to be had about how we actually do and deliver, now that we all agree about the importance of design in start-ups.

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Wolff Olins’ Nathan Williams argues that the modern Brand Experience should be Ubiquitous, Social, Semantic, Sentient and Human: providing a nice framework by which to create or analyse a successful, contemporary brand.

• Ubiquity throughout the experience, across all channels, and 24x365.
• Social, but only enhanced by the social graph, not dependent on it (and importantly the brand shouldn’t attempt to be a social network, just leverage it appropriately)
• How does the brand build semantic meaning to multi-layered, complex data, and help the individual consume it
• Be context aware and sentient; how can the brand be pre-emptive, not passive
• Human: offers simplicity, democracy, and the opportunity to create new behaviours

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A lovely little piece on ideas and innovation by James Trezona that I randomly found:

“Blending art and science is about collaborating in ideas generation: the inter-relationship is critical, you can’t have one thing without the other. A bunch of code or data is just a bunch of numbers without the art.

Science can enable us to be more creative, and creativity allows us to get the most out of our data. But consider ‘the multiplier effect’. If either the data or creative are bad, the idea will fail. It’s not one or the other that we need, it’s both. It’s not science plus art equals results, it’s more science times art, so a zero for either means failure.

That is where the interesting ideas are - at that intersection. The future is all about ideas connecting. Those who can bridge art and science will be in demand, will be powerful.

So if our ideas are going to change hearts and minds, let’s blend them together.”

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Love or hate Tyler Brûlé, this is such an important observation on branding that many wouldn’t want to admit is true:

This is one reason Mr. Brûlé has no plans for a Monocle magazine app yet: on an iPad, no one can see you reading Monocle.

“So many media companies these days forget the power of the brand, of people actually displaying, and wearing, the media brand,” he said. “In public circumstances where you have to choose a seat, you can look at a person’s shoes, you can look at their luggage, and oftentimes, it’s interesting to see what they’re reading as well. ‘Do I want to be near that person or not?’ ”

On the flip side, I wonder how many books with “loaded” titles or covers have seen massive increases in sales since the advent of the Kindle? On a Kindle, nobody can see you reading those awkward self-help books…

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Undoubtedly one of the most gut-wrenching articles I’ve read in a while, this article published in Popular Mechanics describes the behaviours and events that led to the tragic crash of Air France 447.

Like the vast majority of plane crashes, it was entirely down to human error.

…the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

The study of human error is a fascinating, complex area of psychology, which I didn’t quite appreciate during my undergraduate studies (one of my professors was James Reason).

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I thoroughly enjoyed this interview in The Guardian from last November with Andrew Rashbass – chief executive of The Economist Group.

Personally I think the attribution of his success being down to luck is overstated: surely it comes via the superior quality of the magazine’s content, and it’s caught in the eye of a flight-to-quality that (I think, and hope) we’re seeing.

The interview delves into The Economist’s platform strategy, wherein this line simply summarises the success of their iPad/Kindle editions:

It is a screen replica of the print issue’s pages that eschews any need to scroll, making it a reading experience that is far closer to holding a printed magazine itself.

It’s precisely what went wrong with Wired, et al. While others indulged – grotesquely – in the whimsical possibilities of interactivity on the iPad, they missed the point that the tablet reader wants a lean-back experience (i.e. a simulacra of the physical magazine-reading experience), not a lean-forward experience which is expected from using a website on a desktop environment.

All this said, personally I don’t use any app on any platform to read a specific magazine: for me it’s Instapaper, a physical magazine, or nothing.

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It doesn’t quite do it justice, but I’m pleased to see Matt Jones has posted his wonderful presentation “Gardens and Zoos” on the BERG blog, which he presented at the recent In Progress event staged by It’s Nice That.

It’s hard to summarise his talk in a pithy statement without the flourishes of the presentation itself, but for me it revealed some interesting topics:

• In the near future the “U” in “UI” will become invisible: objects acquire their own motivations and agency. Our challenge will be to understand and shape these future human/object behaviours and interactions.
• We need to share our understanding with others, such that design becomes inclusive and “…so we can play with [unpredictable, non-human centered near-futures], spin them round, pick them apart and talk about what we want them to be – together”
• The unhelpful notion of “seamless experiences” – rather, let’s celebrate “beautiful seams” and create seamful systems.

Something else I took from the talk – and I have no idea how or why, perhaps just something I inferred or dreamt up – was how important it was for brands and objects to be imbued with, and convey human personality. That for me is what BERG succeed at beyond other “traditional” (ed: what’s traditional?) agencies.

This was certainly evident when it was Saatchi & Saatchi and Wieden + Kennedy’s turn to talk at the event: BERG’s thinking (regardless of actual work) feels like the (near-)future; incumbent agencies feel like the (distant-)past.

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Yesterday, Iain Tait – Global Interactive ECD at Wieden+Kennedy – launched “version 2” of his blog, Crack Unit, with a wonderful first post extolling the virtues of blogging:

A blog is your own thing to mess with. You’re the boss. It’s like having people round to your house rather than meeting in a nightclub with all its rules and rituals. And sometimes that feels nice. Even if there’s only a few of you sitting round the kitchen table not doing much. Sometimes that’s nicer than the wild anything-could-happen abandon of a night at Ritzy’s with loads of people wearing their best clothes and their best flavor of Axe.

And the fact that it’s your place means you need to do a tiny bit of DIY every now and again. Just the smallest amount of copying-and-pasting code and getting my hands a tiny bit dirty is good exercise for me.

The original Crack Unit was an unmissable resource for me, so I’m excited to see it being rekindled.

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A fascinating article from November of last year about the legacy of the Luddites in The Economist and the tipping point we seem to have reached, “…at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees”. What happens when the Luddite Fallacy starts to look less fallacious?

The article ends on a more up-beat proposition that the Luddites may still be wrong:

The things that make people human—the ability to imagine, feel, learn, create, adapt, improvise, have intuition, act spontaneously—are the comparative advantages they have over machines. They are also the skills that machines, no matter how smart, have had the greatest difficulty replicating.

But in order for the advantages workers have over machines to still be competitive in the workplace, the notion of what constitutes a job will need to change drastically.

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